Col. Rufus J. Plummer Quotes in A Foreign Affair (1948)

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: Morale! Maybe someday we can send a little committee of our own investigating morale in Washington D.C.

Phoebe Frost: Really, Colonel Plummer... you should have your brakes relined!

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: [as she leaves, he scratches his nose with the middle finger, apparently flipping her off. it WAS Billy Wilder, after all]

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: Here's the Reich Chancellery where the Führer fixed up a little duplex. As it turned out, one part got to be a great big padded cell and the other a mortuary. Underneath there's a concrete basement. That's where he married Eva Braun and that's where they killed themselves. A lot of people say it was a perfect honeymoon.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: Well, men, once more it is our honor and privilege to welcome a visiting committee. Lately they seem to be coming as regularly as the electric bill. This time its not just VIPs. This time we're gettin' VIPIs: Very Important Persons In deed. Some congressional committee to investigate our morale. Seems back home they've got an idea this here is one great big picnic. That all we do is swing in hammocks with blonde frauleins, swap cigarettes for castles on the Rhine and soak our feet in sparkling Mosel. Well, let's not kid ourselves. Some of you do go overboard once in awhile. Maybe some of you are working to hard to enlighten the civilian population. And maybe some of you PX millionaires have found out you can parlay a pack of cigarettes into something more than 20 smokes. After all, this isn't a boy scout camp. We've got a tough job on our hands and by and large I think we're handling it darn well. For my dough, we're on the ball. Most of us, anyway. Most of the time. But, what they've got to realize is, you can't pin Sergeant stripes on an archangel.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: One family has already christened a kid DiMaggio Schultz. That's when I started believin' we'd really won the war.

Phoebe Frost: Colonel Plummer, in your eloquent speech, which I'm sure you've made 50 times, you used the phrase "Some of our boys may get out of line sometimes." That, gentlemen, is a masterpiece of understatement.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: What are you driving at, Miss Frost?

Phoebe Frost: In your admirable effort to civilize this country, our boys are rapidly becoming barbarians themselves.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: I explained on that tour...

Phoebe Frost: Yes, I know all about those tours. You put blinkers on us. You maneuver us around. You make sure we only see what you want us to see. Then you give us pamphlets, statistics, and a rousing speech and ship us back a little more bamboozled than when we came. We could have stayed at home and learned as much from Reader's Digest.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: What I want to point out is, that its a tough, thankless, lonely job. We're trying to lick it as well as we can.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: I want every MP to memorize this puss.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: Its a great big mess we're trying to clean up here. There's a lot of rubble. Rubble of all kinds: vegetable, mineral, and animal. You walk around on it, you're apt to stumble or get conked on the head by a loose brick.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: So, we followed her all day, until the five o'clock shadow showed. Sure enough, she was Hermann.

Col. Rufus J. Plummer: You two, watch out for those two.